That seems to be largely because its star is MMA all-star Gina Carano, who does her own stunts, and who is under the sort of scrutiny most male action stars never see. (Among some bizarre pearl-clutching about her fight scenes, her acting ability has been repeatedly questioned, which is strange, because I do not remember a lot of interviews asking Jean-Claude Van Damme how his workshops with Meryl Streep are going.)

We live in a world that makes it impossible to leave discourse at the door about this kind of thing, and means that the movie hits theatres under a lot of baggage it doesn’t deserve. But Haywire itself seems to be blithely unconcerned about it all. Instead, it focuses on turning in a slick action movie that can be boiled down to Vasquez: The Motion Picture, and is exactly as fun as that sounds.

Example: in the film’s opening moments, Carano’s Mallory Kane sits at a diner in upstate New York, waiting for someone. The man who shows, Aaron (Channing Tatum, bless his heart), is not the one she wanted to see, and when she refuses to leave with him, he sighs, orders a cup of coffee – and attacks her. The fight that follows is swift and brutal, with a brief intervention by a college-kid bystander; when Mallory inevitably gets the upper hand, she singles the kid out as her getaway, and the two of them take off in his car while she explains how she got where she is.

The scene, like the movie as a whole, is solid. The cast, including Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, and Ewan McGregor as Indeterminate Accent Man, is clearly having fun. The plot, though it has the requisite double-crosses, is uncomplicated (she’s awesome, she’s set up, she busts out, she tracks down everyone responsible and beats the snot out of them). The script maintains tension while being just light enough that no one ever delivers a tearful speech about the perils of private security contracting in a politically wheeler-dealer world run mad. It’s a wise choice for the untested Carano, though she’s a capable enough actress – she has presence and timing, and while I wouldn’t pay to see her as Lady Macbeth, I enjoyed watching her as an action hero far more than I have enjoyed other actress’s recent attempts at it.

And yes, part of that is because when she’s fighting, it looks sharp, smooth, natural. The fight scenes are hardly ever scored, and often brutal. (The audience responses tended to be a moment of excitement that a fight was coming, followed by a long and increasingly tense silence broken by audible wincing as the fight progressed, and then a release of nervous laughter at scene’s end, which seems notable in an audience likely saturated with action-movie imagery.) One vaguely Bourne-y sequence follows her as she hightails it through Dublin, avoiding the enemy and tangling with the police, and includes her jumping between buildings at considerable height; however, the move doesn’t stand out as a stunt, but rather as a point of tension in a long and palpably exhausting escape attempt. (The camera often follows her claustrophobically as she has to backtrack through escape routes, shimmy down close quarters, and track enemies under pressure. It’s effective; if we could convince Soderbergh to drop the canary-yellow flashback filter and surreal piano interludes, we’d be in good shape.)

But beneath this standard spy story is a quietly subversive main character. Mallory Kane exists in a sphere in which she’s allowed to bypass the usual narratives offered to women who tote action movies on their shoulders. She never has to prove herself against the odds; she’s the best there is, a point no one on her team – or up against her – ever disputes. She doesn’t have to overcome a backstory of victimization; the movie suggests she became a Marine because why wouldn’t you, if you were as dedicated and as calm under pressure as she is? She isn’t vilified for sexuality; casual hookups happen but don’t hamper. She’s not overly sexualized, despite one formalwear fight scene that had the potential to turn into a James Bond set piece and wisely steered away. She doesn’t have to scrabble out from abusive circumstances or punishing family losses; her dad is adoring and capable of handling himself. And she doesn’t suffer from unnecessary machismo off the field of play; while on the run with Frame Story McGee, she strikes up a capable and friendly rapport, smoothly checking in at intervals to make sure he’s following the story that she knows he’ll end up telling the cops.

Though we’re still at a point where a leading woman in a movie tacitly stands for All Women in Movies, it’s still odd that a character who is white, fit, and conventionally attractive can still deviate so much from what Hollywood has made its norm. But she does, and this movie serves both as an action flick with a convincing female lead, and as an under-the-radar glimpse of a possible Hollywood, one that makes the assumption that a female character can be worth watching simply because she’s kind of awesome.

And it’s a good assumption; I’ll be seeing this again.

***

In a telling scene in Breaking Dawn, a skeletal Bella stands in front a mirror, running her hands over the bairnsketball that she’s been told is going to rupture her heart before it comes out. Various in-laws argue about what this means for her (spoiler: broken back and shattered ribs, among other things).

And Bella cringes beatifically into the mirror, and a plucky folk song plays.

This is perhaps the worst thing about Breaking Dawn: it has all the content of a horror movie with none of the context. (Second-worst thing: having to sit through the wedding in what feels like real time.)

It’s almost remarkable how much the movie presents female-gaze psychological horror, made somehow even more monstrous by the romantic lens through which it’s filtered. From the very first moments of the movie, in which Bella is walking around in a pair of shoes that have been purchased for her over her protests, but are nevertheless the shoes we know she’ll be wearing, because of course. On her honeymoon, her husband withholds affection, because he claims he can’t keep from hurting her and this is better for her; he reduces her to tears as she begs him to have sex with her. (His reason for withholding: the first time they had sex, he bruised her in the throes of passion. The movie downplays this into a few fingerprints here or there, which both dilutes the subtext of spousal abuse and makes it somehow even worse than he’s stonewalling her romantically. The following silence, in which they play chess for several minutes in a Pottery Barn catalog, would be a tense portrayal of a marriage falling apart if it weren’t for the comforting soundtrack assuring us that he knows what’s best, and the little wifey will come around.)

When she finds herself pregnant, he withholds all support for her when she decides not to make the decision he would have made about the fetus. (Additional consequence of being pregnant: she’s visually and contextually infantilized for the rest of the film, unequal even to stand up on her own). She lies about her situation and whereabouts to her father (from whom she has been effectively cut off by marriage); her friend in the know belittles and berates her. As the baby drains her life, her in-laws face off to decide what’s best for her and/or the fetus (a term baby-crazy Rosalie repeatedly amends to, “BABY,” in all caps). Near the point of birth, her husband blames her for having decided to keep the baby, and guilt trips her about how he will hate the child, because it is reflective of she decision she made. The baby itself snaps her spine, breaks both her knees, and causes heart failure.

It’s a domestic-horror situation that seems a natural cinematic offspring of Rosemary’s Baby, but somehow the film (and, to some degree, the source text) manages to put the viewer in an even more horrific situation: in order to support any kind of autonomy for Bella, the viewer has to support her series of truly boneheaded decisions in the face of people who are trying to dictate what to do and are, in fact, making more sense than she ever does. (Argument by the anti-fetus contingent: “It will kill you, there is absolutely no doubt, if you want to live you need to get it out.” Argument by Bella: “Well, if it kills me it kills me, and you’ll have the baby to remember me by.” Help us help you, Bella!)

Perhaps the half-hour wedding scene was an attempt to frame as romantic the subsequent events of the film, which are not romantic whatsoever. Even the honeymoon scenes (in which Bella discovers that her bags, packed by someone else, contain nothing but lingerie) take on a strange purgatory quality; when she deploys peignoirs in an attempt to seduce him into having sex with her after the first bruise-inducing time, he laughs and turns away from her. (Bella’s miserable face is one that appears repeatedly throughout the film, as she suffers one indignity after another.) But the movie seems determined to avoid the subtext it continually presents, and uses its succession of plinky folk songs in the background as an attempt to bring the romance back to a movie that otherwise would have us all rooting for Bella to take that speedboat back to shore and get the hell out. (The songs all have lyrics about the joy of subsuming one’s entire identity, just in case you had missed the message.)

In the past, there has been enough of the absurd to help balance the creepy subtext; this movie has its moments of that as well, though they don’t do much to overcome the feeling of wanting to grab a teenage girl by the shoulders and say, “You’re not taking any of this seriously, right? RIGHT?” Jacob, when he reads his wedding invite, gets so angry he rips off his shirt (never not funny); the awkward wedding speeches are true to life in a way that makes you want to gently claw your own face; there’s an almost-endearing montage of Bella trying to prepare for The Big Moment by brushing her teeth and shaving.

But otherwise, only the werewolves offer any relief from the A-plot horror, and that’s not saying much. The pack has vague politics, and one girl-wolf whose primary personality trait is that she’s unwanted by the man of her choice, and its usual limitless supply of cut-off pants stored in the hollow trees of the Pacific Northwest. However, other than trying to manufacture an outward threat for the Cullens, there’s really nothing doing.

(ETA: I can’t refrain from mentioning imprinting, which is presented so matter-of-factly that it somehow surpasses the surrealist comedy of a man looking into the eyes of an infant, seeing the hottie teen she’ll become, and falling to his knees, mostly because the first time it’s discussed is during a beach visit where it goes largely unmentioned that one of them is babysitting the toddler who will one day grow into the woman who better love him back, dammit, and the combination of the image and its apparent acceptance by everyone is a blow from which that little leitmotif never recovers.)

Having covered the body-horror in the first installment, the sequel is freed up to give Bella a chance to be the Mary Sue-est vampire who ever sparkled through the forest. That might be for the best; this movie has enough mixed messages to deal with all on its own.

(By the by, when Bella is healed and made beautiful by vampire venom in the movie’s closing moments, her haggard face is smoothed over and made up; her anorexic limbs are not filled in. Even in the details, this movie really nails it, you know?)

Instead, it sort of felt like Tarsem Singh baked me a batch of snickerdoodles with thumbtacks inside.

Let’s talk about Immortals.

1. So, the plot (term used loosely) is about Theseus, young Hellenic atheist peasant who is being secretly tutored in warfare and bravery and shit by an in-disguise Zeus, who is guiding Theseus in direct opposition to the Greek gods’ non-interference policy (HAHAHAHAHAHAHA).

When the world’s single most evil general, Mickey Rourke, descends on the village to find the magical bow that can defeat gods and will allow him to free the Titans from Tartarus, it’s time for Theseus to take on the mantle of hero, for Phaedra the oracle to stand around and mostly be useless, for Stephen Dorff the Unwelcome to do his Matthew Broderick Sassy Thief impression, and for a seriously grotesque body count to begin.

2. If you want some beautiful imagery, some of these set pieces will give you the fix. As always, he loves textiles:

(Stephen Dorff’s expression indicative of all further Stephen Dorff.)

The labyrinth and Minotaur are well turned out, and their showdown takes place in a temple mausoleum, where an archway of stairs frames a goddess’s head that’s inset with candles to make it glow from within. It’s the sort of thing where you think, “Man, that’s good looking! I wish this stupid scene would stop so we could just look at it.”

In another artsy nod, there’s the Maxfield Parrish Pantheon, where most of the gods have the appropriately chiseled features and liquid-gold costumes.

3. Unfortunately, the Pantheon also includes Poseidon, a visual representation of what happened to this film.

Check that hat. It’s no wonder he looks so sad.

4. Zeus, the most chiseled god of all, is played by Luke Evans, whose agent managed to line up The Three Musketeers AND this in one year! (Unrelated: Luke, call me, I need to chat with you about your agent.) He spends the movie trying to look through the screen and convince the audience he’s better than this, which I believe, but despite this movie and not because of it. Also, apparently, after years of being casually out in acting circles, he is now dating a female PR exec, which just feels like the Bugs Bunny-in-pigtails version of being shoved back in the closet, but I guess that’s the best his agent can do? (Luke, your agent, seriously.)

Here he is, with his daughter Athena, because apparently they are super close, like in all those myths about how they teamed up to solve crime and whatever! (There is so little Greek Pantheon in this thing that he might as well have come up with his own mythology. It’s Tarsem Singh, so you know he could do it, and if a nice purple-blooded body count is what you’re after, one set of vengeful gods is the same as the next.)

5. Freida Pinto, beautiful human who cannot act, plays the oracle Phaedra. Three other, awesomer ladies play her decoys/handmaidens, and they are all much, much more interesting than she is. One of the movie’s nicest images is all of them swaying in prayer, getting the attention of the guards so they can kill the shit out of them. However, they are quickly relegated to Body Count, burned up in the brazen bull, which is just the sort of grotesquerie that Tarsem Singh likes to linger on, and it does its job as a recurring, chilling image before we ever see inside it. When we do see inside it, however, the ladies appear to be mildly sweaty, and they die of what appears to be one thousand toothpick stabs, instead of being roasted to medium well, which is a bizarre lack of specificity for a movie that involves smashing someone’s gonads with a sledgehammer and a hundred thousand head explosions.

6. At one point, Phaedra has to wash off from an oil-slick tidal wave; when she comes out of the shower, she wraps herself in a silk dupioni shawl, and sits right back down on an oily bench (giving Poseidon a run for his money as a metaphor for this entire movie).

Shortly thereafter, she decides the ability to predict the future might negatively impact the rest of this imaginary plot, and the best way to lose those virgin visions is to get busy between the sheets with Henry Cavill. I will not debate the politics of a lady whose primary purpose is as sexual comfort object of the hero, and whose other traits vanish the moment she expresses sexuality, because I think we are all pretty much on the same page with how that’s a pile of bullshit. Also a pile of bullshit: her oracle dress has lots of seaming and potentially even some boning (heyoooo) in the bodice, which you can see in the upper picture. The lower picture is what she does with her dress moments later, as she propositions Theseus, as if that is somehow the same dress and she just unpicked the magical thread that was holding all that seaming together.

DRESSES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY. GOODNIGHT.

7. Stephen Dorff plays the sassy thief full of wisecracks and casual sexual harassment; his scene partners are always casting strange looks out of frame, as if he wandered onto the set from another studio and they’re all just too polite to tell him to leave.

8. However, the script is so Swiss-cheese that it’s not surprising people keep sneaking in. At one point, Athena gifts our heroes (term used loosely) with two horses and informs them, “They’ll run until their hearts give out.” Upon arriving at a suspiciously Helm’s Deep-looking Tartarus garrison, they leap off the horses, who fall to the ground, thrash a moment, and then lie still, at which point a soldier gasps, “What’s happening to them?” and someone actually has to say out loud, “They’re dying,” as if 1) the audience did not just hear what their deal was and 2) career soldiers of ancient Greece had never seen a horse die before.

9. There’s a glimpse of the movie this wanted to be whenever the gods show up. Mostly they lounge around in the heavens giving us some upskirt, having conversations about whether or not they should interfere with human affairs (HAHAHAHAHAHAHA), and I spent that screen time wishing someone had just committed to a nice immortal bitchfest instead of trying to rewrite a mythology from the ground up for a movie that was mostly about stabbing people anyway. However, when they finally do intervene, there is that moment of supernatural thrill in their glowing armor and their super-slo-mo fighting (as heads explode around them like pinatas, which is not my thing, so the thrill was always very short-lived, but a thrill’s a thrill).

They must gather at last to fight their beautiful immortal rivals the Titans (who are trapped in a grotesque Coliseum-cutout box with their jaws affixed to bars, which is just about as creepy as it sounds). The Titans, when released, are…mindless, ash-plastered rage zombies? Also, most of the gods die, because humankind is in charge of its own destiny, except that this movie explicitly refutes atheism and makes fun of politicians who want to use reason instead of putting their faith in the magical bow of the gods, and so then the joke’s on them because that bow totally does work and frees the Titans and then no one even cares about it any more because all the gods are dead? Also, I…don’t know. This movie was just cinema soup. I don’t know anything any more.

10. Here, a prayer circle that his Snow White project is better than this so that his career is not totally tanked:

I wasn’t even thinking of greatness; I was braced for a cheeseball parable. But that parable – about the vast systemic oppression of the many by an elite and hostile few through a system of crushing debt and unfair monetary practices – is relevant and a half, and I was prepared to champion the crap out of any well-executed portion of this social-sci-fi flick.

It’s the “well-executed” part that turned out to be trouble.

Here’s an ad for the film, using the single time-related pun in all of existence that was not actually stated in the film (as I recall, though at some point it just became a blur):

Oh, is THAT how money works? You can earn and spend it? God, am I going to have an awkward conversation later!

The movie maintains this level of subtlety throughout. Sometimes it’s hilarious. Sometimes you just sigh and hope that nobody in the media tries to use this movie to illustrate anything about, say, the Occupy Wall Street movement, because that would just be insulting, because seriously.

1. This movie is about time. Here’s how you know that: because every time-related idiom, figure of speech, and related-vocabulary word is used in this movie one hundred times. Some of it is the usual: when you kill someone by stealing their time, you “clean their clock,” etc. Some of it is not even pretending: “You can do a lot in a day.” “You’re out of time.” “Every minute counts.” Just…you name it, it’s in here. The movie OPENS with the voiceover, “I don’t have time to think about how it happened. I have no time.”

2. If your movie is super high concept, and I decide to see it, I have probably, to some degree, already accepted the concept, you know? “Everyone in the future has a puppy surgically grafted to their chests.” Okay, fine, I promise not to spend a lot of the movie going, “Surgically grafting a puppy to your chest is a weird thing for a person to do.” I will, however, question every piece of outerwear that does not have a dog-head flap in it, or any moment in your movie where a character is like, “Well, now my dog has grown too big for my chest cavity and medical science didn’t allow for that in the many generations we have been living with these grafted puppies, so now it’s too late for me, you go on!” Because that is worldbuilding, and that you need to do. And the higher the concept is, the more work you need to do. (Moon, for example, requires little. Dark City requires more.)

This means that when you tell me in the movie’s opening moments, “I don’t have time to think about how it happened,” you are telling me a lot more than you think you are, and none of it makes me think I am in for some awesome, thoughtful sci-fi.

3. In Time was written and directed by Andrew Niccol. This is his second movie about a dude from the wrong side of the tracks in a classist dystopia who tries to make good by infiltrating the system for his own ends and attracting the attention of a lady out of his league and a cop who’s trying to maintain a status quo he doesn’t quite believe in. The first one was Gattaca, for which I repeatedly go to the mat, because I think it’s really strong, and character-driven, and understated, and stylish. If you like all those things and this theme, maybe just see Gattaca.

4. If you see this movie, this is how it goes: IN A WORLD where time is the only currently and your clock starts at age 25 (no updates on whether you can preload your clock so you can purchase stuff before then) and then you stay 25 until you “time out” and drop dead, and you can buy or sell or give away time via little bloopy boxes or handshakes, Justin Timberlike is a kid from the slums. He lives with his mom (Olivia Wilde), and they semi-accidentally have a hugely Oedipal morning where they make clear that they have crushing debt and are working from day to day (GET IT). He worked overtime to give her some extra hours for her 50th birthday! Then they hug for way longer than a parent and child should hug, and he goes to work at the factory, pressing the bloopy boxes that measure time. (Grafted-puppy moment: There’s a society that is advanced enough to store time in a portable data device, and we still need humans to press these boxes together?)

At a bar that night with his drunk-ass friend, he sees a rich dude about to get jumped by Beastly, and saves him. The incredibly chiseled young man explains that he has soooo long to live and he’s soooooo tired of living, he’s lived 85 years past his 25-year mark, that’s how long he’s lived! How can you even STAND the ennui of BEING ALIVE when you’re so INCALCULABLY OLD and RICH?

He also points out that it’s unfair that so many people suffer with almost nothing while some of them are rich as shit, as Justin looks like he’s just seen Soylent Green for the first time, and that the systemic injustice of a stratified class system has never before occurred to anyone of the lower classes in this entire film ever. (In fairness, it might not have, as everyone in this movie is sort of dim.)

Anyway, Justin wakes up with this guy’s century gifted on his arm, and the guy commits suicide off a bridge just as Justin runs up and is captured by cameras, but he doesn’t seem concerned by this, and is so stoked about his new power that his gives his friend a decade and comes to greet his mom at the bus stop, but she doesn’t show, because she went to the Time-lender branch and didn’t have enough time-money for the bus and so is plowing home in high heels like it’s the last fifty yards of an Olympic High-Heel Relay, but naturally she doesn’t make it because we need Manpain. (Grafted-puppy moment: There is a branch of this moneylender right in the center of town, like, a block from their apartment. Even if you wanted to go pay back some loan and leave yourself with just enough to get home and not any extra even though prices are always going up, why would you go to the branch on the very edge of town when there is a branch one block form your apartment?)

Now that he has guilt from visiting his deadbeat friend and not his mom, Justin vows to get those assholes from the inside! This involves going through a series of “time zone” gates (GET IT) with ever-higher tolls to keep the riffraff out (see, this I buy! I’m fine with this), he reaches what’s essentially the Upper East Side, and gets a room at a hotel, and goes into a casino and wins 600 years off Vincent Kartheiser, who looks like he did not know what the fuck he was doing in this movie but he was just going to smarm the shit out of it anyway.

Actual promo still from this motion picture.

(5. Best line in the whole thing, after Justin ogles Amanda Seyfried for a while: “A strange world, isn’t it? You look at her and wonder – Is she my daughter? My mother? You hope she’s not my wife…”

I am not sure why anyone would feel the need to say this, since this is what the entire world looks like and you would think people in that world are used to it, but I am guessing it has something to do with the fact that, having given in to the ideal of everyone being perpetually sexually attractive, on-screen dynamics broke down rapidly into a huge orgy of youthful cheekbones and they were trying to restore order.)

Justin gets invited to the Kartheiser home, where starlets and supermodels and Ethan Peck from 10 Things I Hate About You are waiting for him, and Amanda Seyfried is REALLY waiting for him, so she can hit on him by lamenting how they all have risk-free lives and don’t you just envy the poor.

(Collective side-eye, and then we may continue.)

Meanwhile, cop Cillian Murphy (doing everything he possibly can with this movie, as always, even though I am beginning to question his choice of movies, because I feel like even though rent is perpetually due for us all, for every Sunshine there’s a The Edge of Love AND a Tron: Legacy AND one of these to sit through with this guy) has decided Justin stole that time, and he tracks him down, and of course Justin gets out with Amanda as his hostage and then they get stranded back in the slums (reachable on the return trip via a single bridge that takes only minutes to cross and is entirely unguarded, apparently), and then they decide that The System is Wrong and they are going to Fight It! So Justin’s plan to bring down the system was to just hang out in Richtown until the cops found him, and then run away, and THEN fight the system because the cops are after him. Just in case you’re keeping up.

Now that they’re hot fugitives, they take breaks from making out to steal increasing amounts of time from rich people and Timelender banks and Robin Hood it until finally they go back to her dad’s house and steal one million years from him and as Cillian Murphy tries to catch them he has a big standoff with them where he admits that he doesn’t like the system but what else can you do, but he forgot to download his per diem of time so he literally just dies in the middle of the standoff and Justin and Amanda take his per diemand run for it, then the entire system breaks down and mass revolution and the world is better the end.

6. There are glimmers of nice moments in here – people can tell you’re not from around here because you eat your food too fast, and rich people don’t have to hurry. Just, every once in a while you think that, when this was initially scrawled on a napkin next to the note SO COOL!, someone had a plan for it. (Also a good moment: At one point Amanda sees Cillian approaching, shouts out a warning to Justin, then remembers she has a gun and just shoots Cillian right in the chest. He’s fine, because he was wearing his Bulletproof Unnecessary Futuristic Uniform Leather Vest, so it’s cool and he’s not even really hurt and the plot resumes the Run, then Make Out pattern for another three hours, but still, it’s always nice when a ladyperson is like, “Hang on, I’m armed! BANG!” instead of just mewling.)

7. On the other hand, Amanda Seyfried runs a lot in this movie. Her first outfit is a Richtown party outfit with five-inch heels. The short dresses change throughout the movie; the five-inch heels never do, and every time they have to run she looks completely surprised by this turn of events, even though for 80% of her screen time they are wanted fugitives actively on the run from the law. I know this is the Rule of Comic Books, but at some point it just gets laughably distracting. (Also, the first sexy outfit she puts on is from his mom’s closet, and it is the outfit she is wearing the first time they bang, and I am just saying that the psychological ramifications of some of this were maybe not really discussed prior to making the film.)

8. Cillian Murphy has a bitchface so masterful that light from the sun takes only three seconds to reach it.

9. Small but noteworthy: even though you can store literally one million years in a little capsule thingee, individuals still store them in huge bank vaults and not small, secure wall safes or anything. No big deal, just saying that’s how this movie rolls. (Grafted Puppies: The Motion Picture.)

10. The thing is, this movie is so disjointed there’s no real wrap-up you can give it. So many subplots appear and vanish like a red shirt in a washing machine that this movie ends up feeling like an early draft of some other, better movie. I mean, at one point it’s heavily noted that Justin’s father was killed by the government for being a revolutionary, but then it turns out he was just giving away some of the time that he won in “time fights” that look like really intense handshakes, but giving away time is how everything in the world is tendered so how did they even know that wasn’t payment for a private debt or something, and even then we’re talking about very few years and yet when Justin receives a hundred years it only shows up as odd because they find a body days later so it’s not like an alarm goes off at the Central Time Bank or anything, and everyone mentions Don’t Make the Mistakes Your Father Did, as if it will pan out, but really it’s just that the very act of charitably giving away time is super suspicious and maybe he was killed or maybe he just died (no one says) and maybe Cillian knew him and maybe not, because it’s not clear, and there’s still that dude down in the Mission giving away time like it is actually literally his job because whenever Justin and Amanda get time they hand it to this dude to distribute and he always does and no one has politically assassinated that dude, so it is all just weird. (Also, not to be a Puppy Grafter, but isn’t the only way to break that system permanently to somehow remove everyone’s timeclock in the world ever? I mean, when your dialogue is things like: “We do what we always do – we follow the time,” I guess I shouldn’t expect the world, but you also tend to tune it out after a while and start wondering how two people with guns manage to change this world entirely by themselves without any sign of an underground resistance movement or anything at any point and then once you start wondering it’s all over.)

It’s a pity, because the parable couldn’t be more timely (GET IT), and Andrew Niccol is clearly capable of good work that’s stylishly shot and well-written and character-driven and moving and thought-provoking, and I would have taken a movie half as good as Gattaca and been more or less content with it. There is nothing wrong with a high-concept sci-fi flick that does not pretend to be more than it is. I was totally down for one of those. But when your high concept relies on creating this complex system your characters break down, I just do not quite understand how this movie is something he made and stepped back from and went, “AWESOME. We are DONE. Justin Timberlake, that was great work when you grabbed the dead body of your hot mom and hiccupped over it repeatedly, that was just ACES work,” you know?

As a fan of fairy tales, and someone who is more than willing to watch Robert Carlyle masticate some scenery one night a week, I went into Once Upon a Time thinking it might be able to overcome its two leads (the sometimes-interesting Gennifer Goodwin and the always-mediocre Jennifer Morrison) and present enough worldbuilding to keep me interested. It was not a particularly uphill battle, until the show actually started.

What the show says it’s about: fairy tales, and families, and an epic mystery between two worlds, and the power of story, and how to live in a world without happy endings (this is stressed a LOT, to the point that villains say things like, “This IS my happy ending!” about their dastardly deeds, as awkwardly-costumed fairy tale denizens sob and wail “Noooo!” and cradle the bodies of their dead husbands who were killed by guards because even though they were in danger there were only two easily-defeatable men-at-arms on duty, which sort of makes you think the Evil Queen is not so much Evil as she is Better-Staffed).

What the show is actually about: mommy issues. And not the delightful, twisted mommy issues that make up the backbone of so many of our classic fairy tales, and which I would absolutely be down for some nice chewing over, but instead the sort of mommy issues that make your eyebrows disappear into your hairline.

Our loner heroine Emma gave a child up for adoption (and is friendless and alone forever, which in some shows would be a coincidence but got the side-eye here). Said youngster finds her in the pilot (literally, she blows the single candle off her lonely birthday cupcake of solitude and suddenly the kid appears in her apartment). He is winsome and talks to her about his weird town full of amnesiac fairy tale characters and her destiny as the child of Snow White. Snow White is seen in flashbacks being a Good Mother who sacrifices everything for her daughter; in her real-world identity, she’s a gormless schoolteacher who talks about the power of story and releases birds into the air. When Emma returns the young lad to his mother, the mayor of Storybrooke (actual town name), we see that his adoptive mother is the Evil Queen, who is ambitious and doesn’t love her child and is mean to Emma about closed adoptions and staying away from her son and twirling her cold, unloving, adoptive moustache.

The doubling of characters between worlds has promise. Robert Carlyle is only painful to watch in half of his scenes, which is maybe all one can hope for, and there is much to enjoy about watching him enjoy every second of it. The awful dialogue was unfortunate. The slipshod production values, in which everyone from Fairyland wears also-rans from Project Runway prom-dress challenges, was unpleasant. But the motherhood-moral equative quagmire in which this show’s entire foundation is mired is just the most awkward ever. (This is not to mention the other sort of gender-specific binaries at play: the dopamine-pleasant young teacher volunteers at a hospital handing out flowers and wordlessly squeezing the hands of bed-ridden extras for reassurance; meanwhile, in their opening cameos, Red Riding Hood’s grandmother yells at her about going out at night to slut it up, because of course.)

I’m willing to give the show one or two more episodes to see how it goes. (I have seen all of The Tenth Kingdom AND Hallmark’s The Snow Queen; I can take a cheeseball fairy tale adaptation when it comes my way.) However, my hopes are not high, and when the pilot ended with the Evil Queen taking away her adopted son’s only book because she’s eeeeevil, and Emma deciding she was going to stay in town and something-something for her son’s sake because Now She’s a Good Mommy, it just gave me the creeps in a way that goes way beyond watching three trolls singing Night Fever as they boat across Central Park.

Something that I think accurately captures the atmosphere and drama of the show was when Emma loses control of her car on her way out of town by seeing a wolf hitting some plot ice and spinning out at three miles an hour, and bumps gently into the Styrofoam sign for Storybrooke, and obligingly lays her head on the steering wheel and pretends she was just knocked out in a car accident, and you watch the TV unfolding in front of you and don’t know how to explain to your mother, who is visiting you and who you have convinced to watch this show with you, what is happening, because you don’t know, and she says, “Can’t you just review the first hour and skip all this?” and you have to tell her it’s only been forty minutes, and there is an awkward silence before you suggest that maybe you forget about it and just hit the town when it’s over. That has definitely been my favorite moment of the show so far.